Tess put her head under the water and came back up pushing her hair out of her eyes. She had more gray than June remembered. Her glasses, perched on the tile a safe distance from the splashing, gave her a vulnerable look that neither her wife nor her daughter ever got to see on dry land.
“Can I tell you the least polite thing I thought yesterday?” she said. “I wanted that sick man to make it another hour to Portland before he got sick. There was a whole five minutes I felt that way. Having wanted something mean doesn't make me his enemy. It makes me a woman who wanted her sister. How long are you going to be sorry for something you didn't do?”
“I feel sorry about something somebody did do. I just haven't worked out what to do with it.”
Tess hauled herself out of the pool. “What did you want from that woman yesterday?”
“Chicken.”
“What do you want today?”
It was a good question. Tess splashed water at her with a foot. June leaned back out of reach.
“I want them to quit telling lies about that kid with the duck. I want my name off their statement. And I want to know why somebody who objected to a rotten way of doing things ended up doing exactly that to me.”
“Have you thought about asking her?”
“What is it with this family and simple solutions?”
“Patent pending.” Tess dried her glasses on her towel. “One more thing. If you call a reporter you tell her this family exists, that's fine. But our kid's name and what we did yesterday are ours.”
June said yes. It occurred to her that everybody had a version of LET HER ASK FOR IT. Sometimes it meant leave her a little room. Sometimes it meant a person was going to have to jump up and down with both hands in the air to be seen. A person could keep using the same five words for twenty years and never notice she'd stopped doing the first thing and started doing the second.
Daniel was due at the conference at eleven-thirty. He answered her at ten-fifteen. She could hear music and the sound of crockery.
“I'm in the lobby,” he said. “I've made about twenty phone calls and learned what happens when a company asks a lawyer what it should do about a green dot. Apparently the question takes months and the answer belongs to the lawyer. What do you need?”
“Can I call Meredith?”
“Melanie passed me her number on the understanding that I'd give it to you if you asked for it. June, I should tell you that they hired Mother in Denver because there'd been a death in our family. She was the woman with cancer who asked us not to wake her. My father loaded carts and they put her on modified duty while she was in treatment. The first meal she fixed that way was her own. She didn't have any special training that told her what another passenger might need. She just arranged for people to let her be a little more herself for a month or two.”
“Why didn't you tell me that yesterday?”
“You were trying to get to Portland. Also I'd been telling the story without that part for so long I had almost forgotten it was something you would need to know.”
“What's the speech about now?”
“Had to hand in the slides two weeks ago. It's still twenty minutes on choice and efficiency. I'm supposed to finish with a picture of a chicken.”
“Oh, I think I could make you a slide with a chicken.”
“I'm counting on the tomato.”
June thanked him and took the number. Then she went to the parking lot, sat on a low wall and called Meredith with the sound of a pump humming through the concrete behind her. It seemed entirely possible the woman would let the call go to voicemail. June had three sentences prepared for that circumstance and none for what came next.
“Ms. Ellis? This is Meredith.”
“I've got that old training manual page. Daniel showed it to me.”
“Yes. I told him he could.”
“Could we talk about it?”
Meredith was at a restaurant a mile from the airport. It stayed open at all hours, mostly serving crews who kept the same hours. She offered to come closer. June said the distance was fine. She told Tess where she was going, borrowed the car, and made her way through a port district that had acquired six new warehouses and lost its best diner since she'd been there last. At a red light she saw a man in a forklift lift up a pallet with a plastic chair strapped to the top. The chair had a hand-lettered sign: FOR THE BOSS WHO HAS EVERYTHING. She was going to have to remember that for Marsha.
The restaurant was called Milton's. Meredith was in the corner booth by the swinging kitchen door, without makeup, wearing a bright yellow raincoat over an orange running shirt. June had never in her life imagined the woman in yellow or orange, although of course in the course of her life she'd imagined this woman doing very little. There was toast on her plate. She had arranged it in four neat triangles around a poached egg.
“Would you like me to get you anything?” Meredith asked.
“I'm having a slight problem with people buying me food. I'll order my own.”
A waitress materialized. June ordered coffee, two scrambled eggs and a biscuit if they had it. “We have it. Doesn't make it a great idea,” the waitress said. June ordered toast.